Below is a calendar of New York theater opening* in September, including three plays on Broadway, two of them starry revivals: Keanu Reeves making his Broadway debut in “Waiting for Godot”  and Bobby Cannavale, James Corden and Neil Patrick Harris in “Art.” The third, “Punch,” a new play by James Graham based on a true story, features a cast that includes Victoria Clark.

See Sept 9

Sept 10

Sept 12

Sept 16

Sept 21

Sept 25

Sept 28

Sept 28

Sept 29

Julio Torres makes his debut Off Broadway, where there are new plays written by John Leguizamo (who also stars), Tim Blake Nelson (starring Elizabeth Marvel), “Eureka Day” playwright Jonathan Spector, and “the Rhinebeck Panorama” playwright Richard Nelson (in Ukrainian!), as well as a performance piece about performance by Eisa Davis, a reimagined Ibsen, and theatrical portraits of opera star Maria Callas, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and fashion designer Alexander McQueen (starring Bridgerton’s Luke Newton.)

The busy month also features several festivals (a couple of them new, a couple of them completely free), as well as two inventive new immersive site-specific plays for a handful of theatergoers at a time. And I haven’t even mentioned the new historical hip-hop musical being likened to a two-man Hamilton, or the solo hit from last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe to which Netflix reportedly bought the rights; it’s at St. Ann’s Warehouse first (or instead.)

The calendar below is organized chronologically by opening date*, or first performance, but we must consider the dates subject to change, thanks to the continuing vagaries of COVID-19, and the normal challenges and serendipity of live theater.   
Each title below is linked to a relevant website. 
Color key: Broadway: Red 🟥. Off Broadway: Blue 🟦. Off Off Broadway: Green 🟩.
Digital or Hybrid Theater: Yellow 🟨 Theater festival: Orange 🟧. Immersive/site-specific: Silver ⬜️ .  Concert/cabaret 🎶 Puppetry: Brown 🟫 Opera: Purple🟪 Outdoors:🌲Free (or “choose what you pay”) 🆓

September 4

🟩we come to collect: a flirtation, with capitalism (The Flea)
Writer Jenn Kidwell (Underground Railroad Game) and the artistic collective blackening weave together stand-up comedy, performance art, and the carnivalesque to debunk the alluring tale of American economic might. The show features Kidwell and ASL artist Brandon Kazen-Maddox (My article about him)
August 26 – September 27. 

🟩Hard to Say (Soho Playhouse)
Edinburgh Fringe favorite Kyle Ayers makes light of having Trigeminal Neuralgia, a rare nerve disorder
Sept 4 – 14

🟧Bahr’s Neurotica Festival (Under St. Marks and Parkside Lounge)
Funny writer and actress Iris Bahr creates a new, four-day festival that leans toward comedy.
September 4 – 7

September 6

🟦Sober Songs (Theater Row)
A musical about six young adults in recovery at a local AA meeting in a Brooklyn church
August 30 – September 28 

September 9

🟦House of McQueen (Mansion at Hudson Yards)
Luke Newton (best known for his role as Colin Bridgerton) and Emily Skinner are in the cast of this play by Darrah McCloud that offers a theatrical portrait of fashion designer Alexander McQueen, deemed the hooligan of English fashion, who committed suicide at age 40.
August 19 – September 28

September 10

🟦Color Theories (Performance Space New York)
Julio Torres makes his Off-Broadway debut with what he describes as a whimsical exploration of color, emotion, and identity that is equal parts comedy, theater, and art piece.September 3 – 21

🟦This is Government (59e59)
In this play written by Nina Kissinger, three congressional interns are stuck at work during a lockdown, trying figure out how this political disarray unfolded and why.
September 05 – September 28)

🟩The Mutt (IATI)
A theatrical adaptation by Anna Nesterova of the chapter “The Boys” from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. 
September 10 – 21

🎶Trans Am (Joe’s Pub)
Lisa Stephen Friday’s solo show explores the rise and fall of the band Lisa Jackson & Girl Friday,, the bitter sweetness of conditional love, and the realities of being transgender in the public eye.
Sept 10-11

September 12

🟩The Essentialisn’t (HERE)
Can you be Black and not perform? Incorporating art gallery aesthetics and an electronic soul score, Eisa Davis (author of Pulitzer finalist Bulrusher, and best-known now as the collaborator with Lin-Manuel Miranda on The Warriors concept album) performs a piece about performance, exploring the cultural techniques that make musical expression a kind of imprisonment – or a transcendent liberation.  
September 10 – 28

🌲Galas (The Amph on Little Island)
Countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo as ‘Maria Magdalena Galas’ in the reinvented production of Charles Ludlam’s 1983 ridiculous take on of the life of opera star Maria Callas. The cast includes Carmelita Tropicana and Mary Testa.
September 6-28.

🟩Family (La MaMa ETC)
A grotesque and pitch-dark play by Oscar-nominee Celine Song, whose charming film “Past Lives” is the exact opposite of this play. Here, three half-siblings mourn their late father and battle over what lies underneath the floorboards
September 12 – 28

September 14

🟦The Wild Duck (TFANA)
David Eldridge’s adaptation of Ibsen’s play:  Gregers Werle, the idealistic and dogmatic son of a wealthy businessman, wreaks havoc when he embarks on a crusade to unveil the false foundations of the life of his friend, Hjalmar Ekdal. Ignorant of the adults’ machinations, Hedvig, Hjalmar’s young daughter, tries to shield a fragile duck from the injuries of the world. Meanwhile, Gregers’ imposition of rectitude at all costs has life-altering repercussions.
September 2 – 28

September 16

🟥Art (Music Box Theater)
Bobby Cannavale, James Corden, Neil Patrick Harris star in this revival of the play by Yasmina Reza (translated by Christopher Hampton) about an argument over an all-white painting that gets out of hand. Directed by Scott Ellis
August 28 – December 21

🟩When the Hurly Burly’s Done (Public)
In this play written and directed by Richard Nelson (and translated into Ukrainian by Yulia Sosnovska), a half dozen women from a Ukrainian theater company in 1920 who have escaped war-torn Kyiv to perform in the countryside, take time out to have a meal together, where they talk, complain, joke, make fun of themselves, etc., all while in pain. in Ukrainian with English supertitles. Nelson is best known for his Rhinebeck Panorama, cycles of plays such as The Apple Family plays that each focus on one family over a meal in real time.
September 16 – 21

September 17

🆓🟧Multiracial Mixfest (Atlantic)
 Readings of full-length plays by Alex Lin, Daria Miyeko Marinelli, Eliana Pipes, May Treuhaft-Ali, and Sharifa Yazmeen. Additionally, Atlantic Theater Company has commissioned Banna Desta, Maxine Dillon, Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin, and Else Went to create short one-acts and present them as an evening of readings.
September 17 – 19. 24- 26

September 18

🟦Mexodus ( Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre)
A historical hip-hop musical created and performed by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson about the r journey of thousands who escaped slavery by crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico.
September 9 – October 11

🟦This is Not a Drill (York at Theatre at St. Jeans)
A musical set in Hawaii among the surreal chaos of a morning in 2018, when an emergency alert warned Hawaii residents and visitors of an incoming missile attack. It’s a sweeping romance about ALOHA, which means both “hello” and “goodbye”
September 9 – October 11

⬜️ ROOM 204 (Walker Hotel Greenwich Village)
The tumultuous affair of an unlikely couple, portrayed by Anjelica Fellini and Dennis Flanagan. The performance takes place entirely within one of Walker Hotel’s guest rooms. Designed for just 10 audience members per night,.
Every Thursday September 18 – November 13

September 19

🟦Relative Stranger (SoHo Playhouse)
A new comedy written and performed by Chanel Ali details Chanel’s tumultuous foster care childhood, her mother’s untimely slip into schizophrenia, and a court ordered paternity test that led her to meet her cop dad when she was 18 years old.
September 17 – 28

September 21

🟪The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay (Met Opera)
A musical adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Jewish cousins on the eve of World War II who craft an anti-fascist superhero and launch a groundbreaking comic-book series, using art to rally America against the rise of Nazism.

🟦Weather Girl (St. Ann’s Warehouse)
In this solo play by Brian Watkins that was a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe, Julia McDermott plays Stacey, a California weather girl, oversexed and underpaid. Today, her regular routine of teeth whitening, prosecco and wildfires descends into a scorched-earth catastrophe, before she discovers something that will save us all.
September 16 – October 12

September 25

🟦The Other Americans (The Public Theater)
A new play by John Leguizamo, who portrays Nelson Castro, a Colombian-American laundromat owner in Queens grappling with a failing business and buried secrets. When his son Nick returns from a mental wellness facility after a traumatic incident, Nelson’s world unravels.Directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, whose son Trey portrays Nelson’s son.
September 11 – October 12

⬜️Last Call: A Play with Cocktails (En Garde Arts)
From the artist-led collective The Pack and playwright Hansol Jung (Wolf Play) comes an intimate, immersive, site-specific performance staged in real New York apartments performed by a rotating cast of Chris Bannow, Esco Jouléy, Dorcas Leung, Brian Quijada, Nicole Villamil, Mitch Winter
September 19 – October 13

🟧Powerhouse International (Powerhouse Arts)
Former BAM artistic director David Binder curates this new festival in a former power plant features more than a dozen cutting-edge works from around the world. Opening tonight: Skatepark, in which dancers from Belgium and Denmark form a community on wheels with local skaters.
September 25 – December 13

September 28

🟥Waiting for Godot (Hudson Theater)
Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter star in this fifth Broadway production of Samuel Beckett’s existential tragicomedy about two men, Vladimir and Estragon, who endlessly wait for a mysterious figure. Directed by Jamie Lloyd (last on Broadway helming Sunset Blvd.)
September 13 – January 3

🟩And Then We Were No More (La MaMa)
In this new play by Tim Blake Nelson, Elizabeth Marvel portrays a lawyer in the not-too-distant future is forced to represent a prisoner deemed ‘beyond rehabilitation’ and destined to perish in a newly developed machine designed to execute ‘without pain.’ The attorney must strive for justice in a system devoid of mercy.
September 19 – November 2

🟦This Much I Know (Theater J at 59e59)
Written by 2025 Tony Award-winning playwright Jonathan Spector, (Eureka Day) and inspired by the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, the play takes us through a psychology professor’s search for his missing wife, weaving together the stories of Stalin’s daughter defecting to America, the son of a white supremacist growing to doubt the beliefs he was raised with, and the secret despair of becoming an accidental killer. 
September 20 – October 1

🟦Murdoch The Final Interview (Theater 555)
Jamie Jackson portrays the media mogul in a solo show “written by an unnamed source” as he encounters family members, revisits Presidents, wrangles with newspaper editors, collides with “Fox News” creator, Roger Ailes, and finally, wrestles, literally, with an inscrutable monster
September 12 – December 28

🆓🟧🟨SolFest 2025 with The Sol Project (PRTT)
This eighth annual edition offers both online and in-person events, including a Sunday afternoon picnic, the North Star Projects Latiné ShortsFest film screenings at Quad Cinema, and staged readings of new theater works by seasoned and emergent playwrights
September 28 – October 2, 2025

September 29

🟥PUNCH (MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater)
A new play by James Graham (Ink, books of “Neverland” and “Tammy Faye”) is based on the true-life book Right from Wrong by Jacob Dunne, who killed a stranger, 28-year-old trainee paramedic James Hodgkinson, with a single punch in 2011. Only 19 years old at the time, Dunne went to prison and turned his life around after meeting Hodgkinson’s parents as part of a restorative justice program. The seven-person cast features Will Harrison as Jacob, and Victoria Clark as both the victim’s mother and Jacob’s grandmother.

*Opening Night

This selection of works of theater is organized chronologically by opening night, but includes the dates when a show’s run starts and ends (when available.)
Opening night is usually not the same as the first performance on Broadway and Off-Broadway (although it is the same for festivals and most Off-Off Broadway shows ) For Broadway and Off-Broadway, there is usually a “preview period” that can last days or weeks, sometimes months. But professional reviews are forbidden from being published until opening night, which is why I organize this calendar by opening night (when it exists and when I can find it) rather than first performance, as a way to support the continuing relevance of theater reviewing. (Those shows that begin in September but don’t officially open until October will be listed in October’s calendar.)
Check out my article: What is Broadway Opening Night? How it’s changed, why it matters.

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